Bobo Wants Protestors Who Are Half Joe Camel and a Third Fonzarelli

Jamelle has dealt with Bobo’s hilarious attempt to get in on Friedman’s radical centrist racket, but there’s a bit I can’t help but quote. As Jamelle says, Brooks is contemptuous about the Occupy Wall Street supporters because they’re not radical — why, they don’t even seem to embrace Brezhnevomics. They abjure new paradigms, have thrown boldness under the bus, and they’re certainly not thinking outside of my box. We need a game-changer. On steroids! So who is the great sage Bobo would have us turn our lonely eyes towards?

Look, for example, at a piece Matt Miller wrote for The Washington Post called “The Third Party Stump Speech We Need.” Miller is a former McKinsey consultant and Clinton staffer. But his ideas are much bigger than anything you hear from the protesters: slash corporate taxes and raise energy taxes, aggressively use market forces and public provisions to bring down health care costs; raise capital requirements for banks; require national service; balance the budget by 2018.

Now that’s bold, new thinking — a bunch of reheated center-right mush featured seven days a week on Fred Hiatt’s crayon scribble page, married to third party dreaming that betrays a remarkable ignorance about how American political institutions function. Now that’s big!

No one could have predicted that BoBo’s bold centrist policy prescription would involve comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted – i.e., a plan that lowers taxes on the wealthy and raises them on the working classes.

Oh, and magic mumbo-jumbo (likely consisting of reduced coverage for the poor) will make health care affordable, and we can draft their asses.

I swear, the only real question left is whether we’re headed full-speed for the late 19th century as the Tea Party and Brooks want, or for the 14th century like the American Taliban want. This is the secret to Perry’s appeal: the way he numbers centuries he can split the difference.

You overestimate the Talibangelicals. They are shooting for the 10th century (you know, 999).

Warren Terra

Arguably you mean that I underestimate the scale of their ambition.

And anyway: who doesn’t like large round numbers? 1000 is so much better than, say, 1453. Even though revising the outcome of the conflict of the latter date no doubt haunts the fevered dreams of the American Taliban.

DrDick

Actually, I meant you overestimate their degree of tolerance for learning and rationalism. They really do long for the violent and theocratic Dark Ages.

c u n d gulag

Bobo’s an inane drone.

If I have to read them, I prefer my members of the Conservative Clown Car Pundit Posse to be historically, hysterically wrong, like Bill ‘Wrong-again’ Kristol.
At least he’s good for some shits and giggles!

Oh, Victor David Hanson, you’re so brilliant! Tell me again about how wining One Big Battle against Saddam’s military will make all the Muslims want to be just like us.

c u n d gulag

My all-time favorite “Wrong-again” Kristol moment was when, despite almost 15 centuries of history and evidence, he assured everyone that there would be no sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed.

Nope, not gonna happen!

And there are no nervous lambs sleeping next to lions.
Yankee and Red Sox fans are like brothers.
And the Hatfields/McCoys are really all just one big happy family.

CJColucci

It’s probably too late, but what if we all just ignored David Brooks?

c u n d gulag

That just encourages him.

DrDick

From the evidence, everything short of total thermonuclear destruction encourages him.

david mizner

It’s even worse than that. Those protestors are so tired in their thinking they embrace the oldest of ideas, Jew-hate:

This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy.

I mean, not only don’t they want to scrap entitlements, they hate Jews!

Really. I mean, I know them more for “Buy Nothing Day” which is featured on the news every frikkin’ year.

david mizner

Yeah, anti-consumerism is their main thing, but in any case, what the editors of Adbusters believe is hardly relevant.

Scott Lemieux

It doesn’t appear to be online, but let’s just say that I would be shocked if the article argues what Bobo says it does, leaving aside the idea that an obscure 7-year old article could represent the views of OWS protestors.

You’re forgetting that our interlocutors in this national conversation spent an entire political season obsessed with the way that the entire Democratic party had been shaped by an article Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward published in the May 1966 issue of The Nation, a magazine notorious then as now for its ability to issue marching orders to the Democratic party.

Warren Terra

I should probably clarify: I meant that they spent an entire political season obsessed with this 1966 article last summer, not in, say, 1967.

Matt Miller? THE Matt Miller? That guy makes oatmeal look all, like, razzle dazzle. I tried reading that column that Bobo loves in the dead tree edition of the Post, and I nodded off in the third paragraph. Seriously, it was a major face plant, right into the couch. And it was like 6:45 in the morning. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Someone needs to take all these Third Way, No Labels and whatever other BS organizations and put their 47 point plans in a blender, press puree and just get one mega pile of oatmeal. Won’t taste any better and won’t keep me awake, but at least I’ll only nod off once instead of every time Fred Hiatt decides to indulge his inner Bloomberg.

Alas, my days of watching the sun come up on the back end of a gloriously inebriated Saturday night have been in the rear view mirror for a few years now. Kind of like John McCain’s presidential aspirations.

Speaking of, I find it very sad that David Broder didn’t live long enough to comment on OWS. We’re all poorer for not having access to his insight.

Scott Lemieux

Do we have clear evidence that he isn’t currently inhabiting Bobo’s body?

firefall

The thing that bugs me is, y’all have got a 3rd, centrist, party committed to compromise and a lack of principles – the Democrats. What you need is a left wing party to balance against the conservatives.

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Boudleaux

They abjure new paradigms, have thrown boldness under the bus, and they’re certainly not thinking outside of my box. We need a game-changer. On steroids!

Perhaps the best string of nauseating au courant cliches ever, especially with the paradigm abjuring. Can’t walk down the street without hearing that one.

Oh well. It is what it is. I continue to look for an opportunity to disagree with someone when he says that. X does not equal x.

I actually like 3 the best, bescaue the letters draw you in to the photo without overshadowing the guy in the background. Number 4, however, has the broadest appeal. Easy to read, grabs you. You only have a second to get their attention, etc. 5 seems a bit too much like an album cover, 6 requires too much work on the shopper’s part to figure the book out. Aside from a tree and the connecting lines, these are all vastly different. How do you want the potential reader to feel upon seeing the book?

There are people who believe that the primary reason David Brooks has a newspaper column is to make George Effing Will read like Mike Royko. Turns out there’s another reason. David Brooks runs a sewage-treatment plant. He takes the unrefined excrement of the right, runs it through his delicate sensibilities, filters out the really awful bits, and produces a clear, neutral-smelling liquid that you can spread on your garden and watch the pansies grow. It is advisable not to drink it, however.

When I read Brooks’ column late last night I thought, this is the stupidest thing he’s ever written. And that’s not a low bar. I thought about posting something but realized that a) I had nothing more to say except that it was stupid and b) Lemieux would be more amusing in saying that very thing.

djw

When I read Brooks’ column late last night I thought, this is the stupidest thing he’s ever written.

This happens to me all the fucking time. Strangely, I’m almost always wrong.

Warren Terra

He may not clear the bar with his next attempt, or with the one after that. But you’ve got to give him credit: he just keeps on trying.

jackd

Isn’t it Edroso who called some idiot pronouncement, “The stupidest thing anyone has ever said until the next Jonah Goldberg column”?